Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users
The advertising industry is immensely powerful, and disturbingly opaque.
By Lucas Ropek
The owner of a data brokerage business recently put out a creepy-ass video in which he bragged about the degree to which his industry could collect and analyze data on the habits of billions of people.
In 2019, the data broker Epsilon was acquired by French advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe. Then, earlier this month, Publicis also acquired Lotame, another data and advertising firm, and announced it plans to integrate it with Epsilon’s business. At the time, Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun said that the new corporate integration would allow his company to deliver “personalized messaging at scale” to some 91 percent of the internet’s adult web users.